Saturday, November 21, 2015

Carol: The predicament of looking

You see someone across the room, and you instantly feel a
connection. You do not have the words to express what you feel, but you know
you are changed by this moment. Your image of this person is filtered through
your past, your present, your vision of the future, your expectations of this
person, and the other thousand things that can come between the two of you. You
must fight through all these filters until you are face to face with this other
person, and only then can you truly connect.

So goes the love story at the center of director Todd Haynes
sumptuous new film Carol. The film stars Cate Blanchett and Rooney
Mara as Carol and Therese, two women who fall in love but whose romance is
complicated by the prevailing social norms of the early 1950s. Haynes was in
attendance Wednesday night at the Lincoln Center in New York City for a
screening of Carol and an extended conversation to kick off
the Film Society’s retrospective “Todd Haynes: The Other Side of Dreams.”

Dennis Lim and Haynes at the Lincoln Center.

The series, which runs through Nov. 29, will feature all of
Hayne’s feature films, several of his shorts, and the HBO miniseries Mildred
Pierce. Each screening will be paired with a film hand-picked by Haynes and
cited as either a direct or indirect influence on the filmmaker’s work, and
Haynes will be on hand to introduce and discuss several of the films.

With its post-World War II setting and gay love story, Carol is
sure to remind viewers of Haynes’ earlier film Far from Heaven, but
while the two share certain similarities, Carol is much grittier
and more intensely focused. Rather than try to encompass the malaise of an
entire generation as he did in that previous work, Haynes narrows his focus to
the specific experiences of Carol and Therese. The script, written by Phyllis
Nagy and based on the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt,
makes us a part of this world and shows us life from the perspective of two
stoic but vulnerable women.

“For me, it was an opportunity to explore the love story in
a way that I felt like I really hadn’t done in movies,” said Haynes. “On the
one hand, it made me think of how I felt when I was in Therese’s shoes, as many
of us have all been, falling in love, maybe when we’re much younger, maybe not,
where you feel completely like you are inventing a language, like no one has
ever experienced this before, like you’re completely at the mercy of the power
of the person who you’re obsessed over and reading the signs and indicators of
how they feel about you.

“But what’s interesting about this is it’s both universal,
and it’s intensely historically specific because that’s really true about
lesbian representation at this time, even more than gay male representation. So
it has both very specific historical relevance and accuracy, but it also speaks
to a feeling that we’ve all had when we don’t have that historical specificity
to support it.”

Therese is a Manhattan shopgirl who first meets Carol when
the older woman is picking out a doll to give to her young daughter for
Christmas. Therese is instantly struck by this woman but has no frame of
reference for her feelings. Haynes pointed out that in the novel, Therese says
she would “call it love, except Carol is a woman.” It is this discrepancy
between raw emotion and social convention that drives the narrative, and Haynes
and his two lead actresses play off this cognitive dissonance wonderfully.

In a way, both women are forced to fight who they are. For
her part, Therese barely understands this strange new experience of falling for
a woman and tries to rationalize her actions to her friends and ersatz partner
Richard. While Carol has carried on relationships with women before, she is in
the midst of a messy divorce and still must learn to navigate the murky waters
of female sexuality – let alone female homosexuality – at a time when women who
stepped outside the norm were perceived as mentally unbalanced.

Blanchett and Mara are perfectly keyed in to this struggle,
and though about half the movie depicts each character’s separate life, the
central romance is so engrossing that everything else seems to fall away – as
it would for two new lovers. Carol’s seduction of Therese is quick but not easy
and takes place in a series of exchanges full of silence and anxiety, which
Haynes took from the novel but did not find in the first draft of the script he
read.

“I felt when I first read [Nagy’s] first draft that there
was something – and she immediately agreed with me when I talked to her about
it – that had been defanged in her treatment of the novel,” said Haynes. “The
novel has such great disquiet and anxiety between the two women, and in the
script, the first draft I read, there was a kind of congeniality between them
right away. It felt like this has been adjusted for financiers. This had been
eased along the long, arduous process of trying to get it made, and when I
talked to Phyllis about that tension and that disquiet, she was like, ‘Yes!
Great! Let’s get that back in the script.’”

Haynes’ instinct was correct, and the heavy silences, during
which neither Therese nor Carol knows what to make of the other, are among the
best moments in the film. In these seemingly blank spaces, Blanchett and Mara
are tasked with conveying a range of complex emotions with a single glance or
furrowed brow, and Haynes was quick to point out the actresses’ contribution to
the success of the film.

Lim and Haynes speak after a screening of Carol.

“It is all in those silences and the lack of dialogue and
the gestures,” said Haynes. “Some of those moments are very clearly marked and
described in the script, but it’s also I think that really great performances
like Rooney’s, which sort of conducts the way we look at both her face reading
Carol and what she’s seeing in Carol, it’s so cognizant of the proportions of
film as a medium and how much trust it gives to the viewer to invite
interpretation and that if she did any more, it would be like, ‘Whoa, whoa,
whoa.’ It’s indicating too much. It’s telling too much. If she did any less, it
would feel maybe vacant or unengaging or uninteresting, and it’s just walking
that really delicate line.”

The director had similar praise for Blanchett, particularly
with regard to her awareness of the camera and its meaning. At different points
through the film, Blanchett must keep track of where her character is both
emotionally and in relation to how Therese feels about her. She must project her
true self and the image of herself that Therese is seeing at various moments in
the story. Blanchett, who was instrumental in getting the film made in the
first place, has a facility for this kind of nuanced character acting that is
simply stunning to watch.

“The amazing thing about this performance of Cate’s is that
Cate is aware of her proximity to the viewer so acutely and basically has to
depict the image of Carol through the eyes of Therese and then various shades
of a closer proximity to the real, complicated, and often ambivalent woman
behind that image,” said Haynes. “If she wasn’t aware of that and almost always
aware of where the camera is and what it’s doing when it’s photographing her –
whose point of view it’s assuming at different times in the movie – the
language of the movie wouldn’t work.”

The language of the film is its imagery as we almost always
view these characters through windows or mirrors or curtains or some
combination of factors. The visual narrative then becomes the stripping away of
these filters standing between Carol and Therese but also between the audience
and the characters.

“The interest in filtering and creating barriers between us
and the objects we’re looking at just reveals the predicament of looking and
maybe at some level stokes desire because when there’s something in the way,
you want to get around it, and you’re aware of the act that you are looking,”
said Haynes. “When there’s nothing in the way, you don’t even have to think
about looking as a predicament, but this continually puts something between us,
so it is filtering. Cate and Rooney also participated in that visual language.
Just as the way I was describing Cate’s sensitivity toward where the camera was
and how she was being depicted through these filters, that visual language was
a starting point for everybody involved.”

Haynes skillfully holds the viewer at a distance throughout
the film, mirroring for us the experience Therese has with Carol, until finally
there are no more barriers to overcome, no more filters to remove. It is at
this moment for the characters and the audience that everything becomes clear,
and once it is, we are truly able to connect.

Lovers and Lollipops

Haynes chose to pair Carol
with Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin’s 1956 romantic comedy Lovers and Lollipops, which follows the story of a single mother
introducing her 7-year-old daughter to her new boyfriend. The film is a funny,
honest snapshot of its time and place and captures a version of New York City
that heavily influenced Haynes’ portrayal of the city in Carol.

Lovers and Lollipops

“Lovers and Lollipops
was a discovery because I didn’t know about it, and I was really interested in
evoking natural light and natural settings in New York City at this time, but I
wasn’t finding great examples of that from Hollywood at the period,” said Haynes.
“Well, Ruth Orkin and Morris Engel were partners, as I mentioned earlier, and
they made these films together, and Lovers
and Lollipops, unlike Little Fugitive,
which is about a little boy who runs off to Coney Island for the day, this one
really took place in a lot of the locations that are relevant to Carol, including a scene in Macy’s toy
floor.

“Macy’s in Lovers and
Lollipops is like a disaster area. There’s trash on the floor and kids rolling
around and tired shopwomen and pegboard walls, and [production designer] Judy
Becker and I were like, ‘Pegboard, yes! We’re going to put pegboard all over Carol.’ People are always saying, ‘Carol is such a stylish-looking film,’
and I’m like, ‘What?’ It’s dingy and distressed, and I love that about it. I
mean Carol is stylish, and the clothes are great looking because people dressed
that way in the ’50s, but I love the distress of it.”

In addition to the photography, Lovers and Lollipops was a tremendous influence on the depiction of
Carol and Therese as women of the period, and Haynes said Blanchett and Mara
took great inspiration from Lori March’s central performance.

“The woman represents a kind of lost example of femininity
that you don’t see in actresses from the period and we haven’t seen since – maybe
you see glimmers of it in your grandmothers – and it’s a kind of poised,
slightly mannered version of a woman that is just kind of a lost iconography,”
said Haynes. “It was just so interesting to both Cate and Rooney in looking at
how to build these characters, who are both very different kinds of women in Carol, but this central character in Lovers and Lollipops was instrumental in
that development for both actresses.”